A Long-Shot Bid to Save the Monarch Butterfly

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Conservationists hoping to protect a threatened wild species tend to take a standard set of actions. These can involve political campaigns, lawsuits, and media outreach. But sometimes it’s the unexpected approaches that can make the difference. Over the past several years, artist Jane Kim has been creating large-scale public murals of the monarch butterfly, an insect that’s in a state of crisis. Recent surveys indicate the that the population of the western monarch in California has plummeted to below 30,000, down from 4.5 million in the mid-1980s. Kim’s latest work is a painting in San Francisco's Tenderloin district that wraps three sides of a 13-story building and includes a 50-foot-tall monarch. It’s suddenly one of the most dramatic features in the city’s skyline. The question now is whether this extraordinary piece of public art will spur the actions really needed to save the species—or become a tribute to a once beautiful butterfly.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by the 2020 Ford Explorer
0:04.9	The available intelligent four-wheel drive and the terrain management system it's built for life's adventures
0:11.3	Which makes it the ideal vehicle for modern day explorers
0:14.6	like professional ski mountaineer Hillary Nelson. Being a ski mountaineer
0:18.9	is to be in a very niche small sport.
0:24.6	Essentially it involves being out in the mountains
0:27.6	for multiple days at a time.
0:29.8	For me, it involves going to the Himalayas to the Andes you know all over the globe.
0:35.6	Hillary's been on more than 40 expeditions around the globe. In 2012 she went to
0:40.8	the Himalaya to climb both Mount Everest and Lotsy, the fourth highest peak on the planet, in a single 24-hour push.
0:48.0	Two years ago, she went back to Lotsy and with her expedition partner became the first to ski down from the summit.
0:54.6	I think one of my favorite trips ever was the Isle of South Georgia, which is right on the Antarctic
1:00.5	Circle and we took this crazy boat there and made a first ski descent of
1:07.0	Mount Norman which is totally an obscure mountain but it was a pretty amazing trip with
1:11.4	penguins and all kinds of crazy wildlife.
1:14.4	Not all of her trips have been successful. For Hillary, it's all about the effort, not
1:19.6	the result. She wants to put herself at the edge of her abilities and see what that can teach her.
1:25.0	To be an explorer to me is to push into places where I am uncomfortable.
1:32.0	I really love to go places where there's no maps where nobody's ever been before.
1:37.0	That's like my sweet spot. And by doing that, I'm putting myself physically and mentally into places where I can learn and that's
1:46.5	exploring to me.
1:47.7	For all of life's adventures,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Outside Podcast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Outside Podcast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.